Professor Seeley delivered a very impressive and sagacious address to
the Professor of French on Tuesday at Cambridge, on the relative claims of modern and ancient languages to a place in education. He confessed his own preference for the classical languages, but maintained that the issue was not between true culture and education subsidiary only to utilitarian ends, but between two instruments of culture one of which is represented as greatly superior to the other. "We are not asked to renounce culture for business, but for the sake of business we are asked to impart culture by a new method, and the complaint is that this new method is, for the purpose of culture, second-rate, while the old method was first-rate." To this contention Professor Seeley answers that it depends on how far the old method is pursued whether it be first- rate or not ; that it is not first-rate, but second-rate, for those who are intended for an early apprenticeship to active life and business. For these a good knowledge of English and of modern languages may be made a much more effective instrument of culture than the very bad knowledge of Latin and Greek which is all that they usually acquire. Put in this modest form, we agree with Professor Seeley ; and yet even an exceedingly imperfect knowledge of a great ancient literature in which our modern ideas and enthusiasms are not buzzing about like gnats thirsting for one's life-blood, is a gain of which it is hard to overestimate the importance. The difference between an ancient literature and a modern, is the difference between a world which you study from a tranquil distance, and a world from which you may contract a fever, or even a delirium.
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